Mixed Race Studies

Representing Mixed Race: Beyond “What are you?”

Talking Race: A Digital Dialog
2013-05-28

Laura Kina, Vincent DePaul Associate Professor of Art, Media and Design
DePaul University

My 2011-12 oil paintings Issei, Nisei, Sansei, Yonsei, and Gosei are on view in “Under My Skin: Artists Explore Race in the 21st Century” at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle May 10-November 17, 2013. The Japanese language titles mark the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth generations from my father’s lineage to live in the United States.

Issei is a ghostly indigo blue portrait of my great grandmother, who came in 1919 through the “picture bride” system of arranged marriage from Okinawa, Japan to the Big Island of Hawai’i to work on a sugar cane plantation in Pi’ihonua (near Hilo). Her image flickers in front of a row of female sugar cane workers dressed in protective work clothes made from repurposed kasuri kimono fabrics. Nisei features a similarly blue tinged portrait of my grandmother in front of a steamship, the Kamakura Maru, circa 1937-39 when she was sent back to Okinawa for high school. Sansei is a sepia toned image based on my mom and dad’s engagement photo from 1968. Next to their image is a colorful patchwork quilt made from vintage Aloha shirts. Yonsei features my own black and white wedding portrait rendered on top of an auspiciously celebratory red enameled background. I wore a white kimono and constructed Japanesque identity and my husband, who is Ashkenazi Jewish, looked like a young Sean Penn in his black tuxedo. Gosei is a portrait of our daughter Midori wearing a Hello Kitty t-shirt, the ubiquitous consumer sign of global Japaneseness. I painted her during the first weeks of September 2012. She is standing on the beach at once a little girl, my baby, and on the cusp of tweendom and about to enter her Hebrew school education. Midori’s expression and the formal composition directly reference the viewer back to Issei while the exaggerated blueness of her eyes and lightness of her skin signal her potential passing into whiteness…

…I identify as hapa (half Asian), yonsei (fourth generation), Uchinanchu (Okinawan diaspora), and more generally and politically as Japanese American, Asian American, and mixed race. I’m also white but in Chicago, where I live, I am usually read as “Latina” but I have yet to embrace a Hispanic identity (I do have a Mexican American stepdaughter though). I live in an urban South Asian/Orthodox Jewish immigrant community. I’m a convert to Judaism, but no one ever guesses I’m Jewish. I don’t look the part. I’m more likely to be mistaken as Indian, vaguely reminiscent of the Bollywood movie actress Preity Zinta. My father is Okinawan and grew up on a sugar cane plantation on the Big Island of Hawai’i and my mother is from Kingston, Washington, where her family ran a roadside motel near the Kingston ferryboat landing. Her mom was a seamstress from a Basque-Spanish agricultural family and she grew up speaking Spanish in Vallejo, California. Her father was French, English, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch heritage (aka “white”) and hailed from Wacko, Texas, by way of cotton fields in Tennessee. He was a descendent of James Knox Polk, the eleventh president of the United States, as well as Major General George Pickett, whose infamous charge was the last battle of Gettysburg. Sometimes I think it’s funny that I’m simultaneously eligible to claim membership as a Daughter of the American Revolution and to throw my lot in history as a descendent of a Japanese “picture bride.”…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson (Klett review)

Theatre Journal
Volume 65, Number 2, May 2013
pages 303-304
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0043

Elizabeth Klett, Assistant Professor of Literature
University of Houston, Clear Lake

Ayanna Thompson’s exciting book analyzes a wide variety of sites for performing, interrogating, and dismantling Shakespeare and race in contemporary American popular culture. Arguing that “Shakespeare’s American cultural value and legacy cannot be weighed through performances in traditional venues only” (7), Thompson extends her purview beyond expected forms (such as professional theatre productions and literary and film adaptations) to include nontraditional modes of performance (such as YouTube videos and prison and youth-oriented productions). The book as a whole provides a fascinating and multilayered appraisal of the uses (and misuses) of race in American appropriations of Shakespeare and his plays.

One of the most notable aspects of Thompson’s book is her ability to work with conflicting statements and oppositional ideas, which she often presents, at least initially, as epigraphs to her chapters. For example, she tackles the debate over so-called color-blind casting by foregrounding the very different views of August Wilson and Robert Brustein. Similarly, the book revisits the eternal tensions between universalizing and historically particularist interpretations of Shakespeare, suggesting that Shakespeare is both freeing and something from which one must be freed. Thompson does not attempt to resolve these kinds of contradictions and instabilities; instead, she revels in them, exploring what they reveal about contemporary American culture and its preoccupations with Shakespeare and race. She does take sides, however; as her first chapter warns, the book is occasionally polemical, “because this is a project that requires action and not just passive reflection” (14). Her main goal is “to bring contemporary race studies and contemporary Shakespeare studies into an honest and sustained dialogue,” contending that many performances, citations, and analyses of Shakespeare ignore or elide racial issues (3).

The second and third chapters focus on two films and a young adult novel that engage with Shakespeare and race in varied ways. Thompson’s analysis of each is intriguing and made me want to watch the films and read the novel for myself. In Suture (1993), a film noir about two brothers, one white and one black, Thompson finds a vexed “desire for colorblindness in contemporary American life” (27); although the film strategically ignores the racial differences between them, it also exposes the seam of the racial divide in a culture that elevates stereotypically white standards of beauty. Her argument is fascinating, but the connection to Shakespeare (cited several times in the film) feels somewhat tenuous. Her analysis of Bringing Down the House (2003), a studio vehicle for Steve Martin and Queen Latifah, however, is brilliant. Unpacking the meanings implicit in the character of “William Shakespeare,” a dog owned by a rich conservative, played by Joan Plowright, Thompson concludes that in this satirical film, “Shakespeare represents the epitome of Western culture because he represents the exclusivity of white culture” (37). Targeting both bardolatry and the false universality of whiteness, this big-budget film thus reveals larger ideas circulating in American culture about the meanings of Shakespeare and race and justifies Thompson’s choice of popular materials for her analysis. She goes on to place a more obscure source, the 1992 novel Black Swan by Farrukh Dhondy, in the context of other writers (such as Maya Angelou) who have imagined a black Shakespeare. While she argues that the novel “asks the reader to interrogate if/how the identity and race of Shakespeare impact one’s understanding of the plays,” she also notes that reviewers of the novel tend to whitewash the main characters’ racial identities (55).

Thompson’s fourth chapter is one of the strongest, offering an intelligent discussion and analysis of cross-racial casting. In it, she analyzes the rhetoric employed by classical theatre companies, such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), to describe their approach to race and casting practices, revealing how these companies attempt to yoke Shakespearean universality and multiculturalism together to create “relevant” performances (73). Thompson does not find the results wholly satisfactory, even at well-intentioned companies like OSF. Her “holistic” approach to multicultural casting would incorporate “diversity initiatives” at every level of production to ensure…

Mixed Ethnicity, Hidden Identity

The New York Times
2013-05-24

Kathryn Shattuck

With his long-lashed chocolate eyes and inviting lips, used to seductive effect in “Rescue Me,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” Daniel Sunjata has the kind of face not easily forgotten, or so you’d think

“If I’m exposed to crowds repeatedly, I could count on my hands the number of times people are going to say, ‘Hey, aren’t you Adam Rodriguez from “CSI: Miami”?’ ” he said, his laughter tinged with what might have been a touch of ruefulness. Especially since Mr. Sunjata, 41, a high school linebacker in Chicago who traded in dreams of business school for the stage, has supported himself by acting ever since he earned an M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1998. No waiting tables. No tending bar.

He might finally kiss Mr. Rodriguez’s ghost goodbye with “Graceland,” a new series that premieres on June 6 at 10 p.m. on the USA Network. Mr. Sunjata stars as Paul Briggs, a legendary undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation living in a Southern California beach palace with a motley crew from the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Then Mike Warren, a rookie played by Aaron Tveit, arrives from Quantico where, like Briggs, he graduated at the top of his class. Soon Mike discovers that his assignment — to infiltrate the local underworld with his housemates — is camouflage for a more important task: to investigate Briggs himself.

Recently Mr. Sunjata — his casual outfit in contrast to his elegant, thinking-man’s demeanor — spoke with Kathryn Shattuck about living large and letting it all hang out. These are excerpts from their conversation…

….With roles ranging from a Nuyorican firefighter on “Rescue Me” to a fashion designer in “The Devil Wears Prada,” you seem to have defied stereotyping.

When I was coming out of graduate school, I wasn’t really sure if my ethnic ambiguity [Irish, German and African-American] was going to be a help or a hindrance, but I think that ultimately it has helped me. It’s set me apart from other guys who might be considered leading-man types in the sense that I don’t necessarily look like everybody else. But a lot of it depends on the open-mindedness of the casting director…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Las Caras Lindas’: To Be Black And Puerto Rican In 2013

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2013-05-25

Jasmine Garsd

I am a black man
Who was born café con leche
I sneaked into a party, to which I had not been invited.
And I got kicked out. They threw me out.
When I went back to have fun with the black girls
All together they said ‘Maelo, go back to your white girls’
And they kicked me out. They threw me out.”

– Ismael Rivera, “Niche“

In “Niche” (“Black Man”), iconic Puerto Rican singer Ismael Rivera navigates the labyrinth of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean. A light-skinned “café con leche” black man, he wanders through his island like a ghost of a colonial Spanish past, shooed off by both blacks and whites uncomfortable with his presence and what he represents.

In another iconic and deeply melancholy song, “Las Caras Lindas” (or “The Beautiful Faces”), Rivera sets aside the discomfort and pens an ode to his people: “The beautiful faces of my black race, so much crying, pain and suffering, they are the challenges of life, but inside we carry so much love.”

I was recently in Puerto Rico reporting on the island’s troubled economy and reignited diaspora. During that time, I had the chance to visit legendary rapper Tego Calderón. In his studio in Santurce, Puerto Rico, I found the entire place wallpapered with photographs of Ismael Rivera…

Read the entire article here.

At Peace With Many Tribes

The New York Times
2013-05-19

Carol Kino

HUDSON, N.Y. — One sunny afternoon early this month Jeffrey Gibson paced around his studio, trying to keep track of which of his artworks was going where.

Luminous geometric abstractions, meticulously painted on deer hide, that hung in one room were about to be picked up for an art fair. In another sat Mr. Gibson’s outsize rendition of a parfleche trunk, a traditional American Indian rawhide carrying case, covered with Malevich-like shapes, which would be shipped to New York for a solo exhibition at the National Academy Museum. Two Delaunay-esque abstractions made with acrylic on unstretched elk hides had already been sent to a museum in Ottawa, but the air was still suffused with the incense-like fragrance of the smoke used to color the skins.

“If you’d told me five years ago that this was where my work was going to lead,” said Mr. Gibson, gesturing to other pieces, including two beaded punching bags and a cluster of painted drums, “I never would have believed it.” Now 41, he is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half-Cherokee. But for years, he said, he resisted the impulse to quote traditional Indian art, just as he had rejected the pressure he’d felt in art school to make work that reflected his so-called identity…

Read the entire article here.

Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Tate Modern: Exhibition
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
2013-05-01 through 2013-09-01

Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists to have emerged from North America since the mid-1990s. Her gorgeously intricate and highly imaginative works are realised with a wealth of virtuoso detail and wit. This is her first major solo exhibition in the UK, providing the first ever opportunity to explore an overview of her twenty-year career.

Gallagher brings together imagery from myth, nature, art and social history to create complex works in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film and animation. The exhibition explores the themes which have emerged and recurred in her practice, from her seminal early canvases through to recent film installations and new bodies of work.

In her series of wig-map grid collages, Double Natural, POMP-BANG, and eXelento, Gallagher has appropriated and incorporated found advertisements for hair and beauty products from the 1930s to the late 1970s from publications such as Ebony, Our World, and Black Stars. These advertisements fostered ideals in black beauty through wigs and hair adornments, which Gallagher has then recontextualised, collaging the Afro wig elements and embellishing them with plasticine. As she comments: ‘The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.’…

For more information, click here.

‘One Drop of Love’ Creates Ripple Effect at UCSB

The Bottom Line
Weekly Newspaper of Associated Students, UC Santa Barbara: News, Features, Video & Investigative Journalism for UCSB
2013-05-13

Yuen Sin, Staff Writer

The personal is very much the political, as actress-playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni illustrated through her solo show “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval.” The show was performed at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Multicultural Center on May 7.

First formulated as a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis project, “One Drop of Love” began as Cox DiGiovanni’s personal attempt to revive her estranged relationship with her Jamaica-born father, who failed to show up at her wedding years before.

What ensued was a powerful multimedia, one-woman play laced with wit, warmth, and depth that fused her fragmented experiences with racial and cultural dispossession into a coherent narrative. The multidimensional show traversed back into the years of Cox DiGiovanni’s family history to untangle the weight of the socio-political events that have inevitably contributed to a crucial part of her identity and self-perceptions today…

…Cox DiGiovanni slipped in and out of multiple roles with dexterity, first imperiously bearing down at the audience as an anonymous U.S. Census Bureau officer, and then staggering affectionately across the stage with a lilting accent as her grandmother, revealing through her impressions the fluid and ultimately arbitrary nature of identity labels.

Her personal trajectory of “placelessness”—not seeing herself as “black” enough to join the Black Students Union, and yet having candy vendors in Cape Verde, West Africa, come up to her (while on a pilgrimage of sorts to trace back her African roots and understand her father’s pan-African attitudes) to ask her why she was so “white”—was interspersed with scenes that traced the evolution of the practice of racial categorization by the U.S. Census Bureau. The contrast brought to the forefront her sense of frustration from continually being racially defined by others, and the puzzling practice of placing someone in the category of “black” as long as they possessed even “one drop” of Negro blood—hence the play’s title.

At the post-show dialogue with UCSB’s professor of sociology G. Reginald Daniel, Cox DiGiovanni reiterated the importance of engaging in “scary conversations about race and racism,” reflecting that her work producing and performing “One Drop of Love” completely transformed the nature of her family relations after their involvement in her show…

Read the entire review here.

Ellen Gallagher: wigs, waterworlds and Wile E Coyote

The Guardian
2013-05-07

Bim Adewunmi

Adverts from black magazines, Plasticine, eyeballs – in the work of Ellen Gallagher, it’s all woven together into something new. Bim Adewunmi visits her chaotic Rotterdam studio

Throughout our interview, Ellen Gallagher makes frequent trips to a large bookcase on the other side of her studio, pulling out items she thinks are relevant and interesting. By the time I leave, I have a list of names written down on a piece of paper: people from the realms of visual art and literature whose work Gallagher implores me to seek out.

Overlooking the port of Rotterdam, her studio is a whitewashed space bathed in light, with vast windows and occasional glimpses of passing clouds via skylights. It is busy and not especially tidy: the artist’s red, paint-spattered desk is cluttered with books, little knives and intricate paper cutouts. You get the impression, however, that she knows where things are. On the walls are a couple of newer paintings: abstract, blue, serene. On a low table, there are proofs of the catalogue for AxME, her new show at the Tate Modern in London. Its title is a play on the fictional Acme corporation that supplied Wile E. Coyote with mail-order gadgets in the cartoon Roadrunner, as well as a reference to the African-American vernacular for “Ask me”.

Born in Rhode Island in 1965, to a black father of Cape Verdean extraction and a white Irish Catholic mum, Gallagher studied writing before attending art school in Boston. She is probably best known in the UK for Coral Cities, which appeared at Tate Liverpool in 2007. The show featured Watery Ecstatic, a series of paintings inspired by the myth of Drexciya, or the Black Atlantis – an underwater city populated by the descendents of Africans thrown off slave ships. Gallagher’s fantastical lost souls and eerie sealife fascinated the writer Jackie Kay, who called her work “jazz on a huge canvas”. The playwright Bonnie Greer is a big fan, too…

Read the entire article here.

DePaul Art Minute – War Baby/Love Child exhibition

DePaul Newsroom
DePaul Art Museum
2013-05-16

DePaul University Associate Professor Laura Kina discusses how art featured in the “War Baby/Love Child” exhibit helps to tell the story of mixed race Asian Americans and the complexities of their mixed-heritage identities, in the third installment of the DePaul Art Minute, which provides a forum for DePaul professors to relate their expertise to artwork at the DePaul Art Museum.

Local Artists Collaborate on Asian Heritage Art Exhibits at DePaul

Vocalo Morning Amp
Vocalo 90.7 FM
Chicago, Illinois
2013-05-16

Brian Babylon and Molly Adams, Hosts

The exhibit War Baby/Love Child at the DePaul Art Museum highlights the work of mixed race artists who share Asian heritage in their identities. Curator Laura Kina and artist Mequitta Ahuja joined AMp hosts Brian Babylon and Molly Adams in the studio this morning and discussed their personal family lineage, the stereotype stamped on mixed children whose roots came from Asian countries where the United States was involved in, and how kinship is formed among “war babies” through artistic expression and exhibits.

Download the story here.